Hispanidad Day (Feast of the Holy Virgin Pilar)
Description:
Initially, this day was celebrated in Aragon (one of the historical regions of Spain) as a holiday in honor of Our Lady Pilar. According to the legend of St. The Virgin appeared to the Apostle Santiago on the banks of the Ebro River and supported the saint in his difficult missionary duty - the spread of Christianity in Spain. And the Mother of God appeared, standing on a column (column, pillar - in Spanish pilar), hence the name of the Holy Virgin Pilar.
The cult of Our Lady Pilar is one of the most revered and famous in Catholic Spain. Older Spaniards are very fond of this holiday, they love it more than their own birthday.
On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus, leading a Spanish expedition, discovered the lands of the New World. It is quite natural that believers saw this as a sign of patronage and help from the Holy Virgin Pilar. Thanks to this discovery, the name of Columbus is inscribed in gold letters in the history of not only Spain, where the National Day is celebrated annually on October 12, but also in world history.
The origins of the October 12 celebration take us back to the past century. In 1913, Faustino Rodriguez San Pedro (a well-known and influential businessman and lawyer, who at that time headed the Latin American Union) proposed to name the 12th of October Fiesta de la Raza (the holiday of the Spanish race). It became an official national holiday in Spain in 1918 and was celebrated throughout Spain and Latin America.
However, in 1926, the Spanish priest Zacharias de Viscarra, showing more respect for the diversity of nations in Central and South America, wrote an article in which he proposed replacing the word "race" in the description of the holiday with the word "Hispanidad". In 1935, the national holiday was officially renamed Fiesta de la Hispanidad.
One of the meanings of the word Hispanidad is a community, a community of Hispanic peoples. In Franco’s time, this day was celebrated as a day of the Spanish race, the Spanish spirit and had a kind of imperial character. Not surprisingly, many Spaniards nostalgically recall the days of the Spanish colonial empire, in which the sun never set.
Today, democratic Spain considers this day a kind of birthday of the Spanish language community, a day of Spanish civilization. It should be noted that many left-leaning Spaniards are still skeptical of this date.